Bibb Latané

Common sense might suggest more witnesses means more help available.

Darley and Latins suspected the opposite.

In the 1968, they designed careful experiments to test it directly.

putting people in situation with a stage emergency, sometimes believing they were the only witness, sometimes believing others were also present, but unable to see or hear each other's.

... nothing became a national symbol, and it launched, launched this research into bystander apathy.

So bystander apathy, um, a psychologist, there's a psychologist named John Darley and Bibb Latané who studied why people sometimes don't step in when others are around.

Mm.

Their experiments showed people were much less likely to help in an emergency when they believed others were also watching.

A room full of people waiting for a signal will take one from somewhere, even if the only signal available is that no one else is moving.

In the late 1960s, psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley tested this by quietly piping smoke into a room where people were sitting filling out questionnaires.

They wanted to know what people do when something seems wrong and no one else seems bothered.

So in that experiment, that classic smoke room experiment, three-quarters of people who were by themselves reported the smoke.

The first pillar they identify is the bystander effect and the diffusion of responsibility.

Okay, Latane and Darley.

This is classic psychology, the idea that if you have a heart attack on a crowded city street, you are actually statistically less likely to get help than if you have a heart attack in front of just one person on a country road.

Because in a crowd, everyone assumes someone else is going to call an ambulance.

Everybody may be waiting for somebody else to do something.

There's some research by Darley and Latane that experiment where participants heard a seizure.

People responded less readily when they believed other witnesses were present.

Other people being there does not mean help is coming.

Hello and welcome.

I'm so glad you're here because today we're diving into one of the most elegant and mathematically satisfying theories in the whole of A-level psychology, social impact theory proposed by Bibb Latané in nineteen eighty-one.

Now, I know what some of you might be thinking, maths in psychology? But trust me, once you understand this theory, you'll have a genuinely powerful framework for explaining social influence, and you'll be able to pick up marks across AO one, AO two, and AO three with real confidence.

By the end of this episode, you'll know the formula, understand each factor, be able to apply the theory to real-world scenarios, and crucially know exactly what Edexcel examiners are looking for.

So let's get into it.

Let's start with the big idea.

Latané proposed that social influence, the impact that other people have on us, can actually be expressed mathematically.

His formula is I equals F of S times I times N, or in plain English, impact is a function of strength, immediacy, and number.